Alicia reported for her scheduled check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April, a process she completed several times as an immigrant living in Louisiana for nearly a decade. This time, he was suddenly taken into federal custody.
ICE transported her to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, where agents performed a health check that revealed she was pregnant. Although ICE directives generally prohibit the detention of pregnant women, Alicia was held there for three months.
At the facility, away from her two children — a teenager and a child under the age of 5 — she was given small portions of “low-quality” food that left her starving. She also underwent a medical examination to which she did not consent, and suffered a miscarriage, civil rights groups said in a letter to ICE last month.
The groups demanded that ICE review all pregnant women in its custody to identify and release them. independent ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, have been asked for comment.
Alicia is one of more than a dozen pregnant and postpartum women who reported being held in restraints, receiving inadequate nutrition and suffering “medical neglect” from ICE agents at the Basil facility and another detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
Federal agents detained a nine-months-pregnant woman after she walked out of a hearing in New York City immigration court. An unknown number of pregnant and nursing women have been detained this year, despite ICE’s own directives generally prohibiting them from being detained, the letter from civil rights groups said (Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty)
“There is no way that detention is an appropriate environment for someone who is pregnant,” said Sarah Decker, senior staff attorney at RFK Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy organization. independent. Decker spoke with Alicia, known only by a pseudonym, while she was in custody.
About a month into her detention, Alicia began experiencing severe abdominal pain, vaginal discharge, cramping and bleeding. He was handcuffed and taken to a nearby emergency room. There, she underwent an invasive medical procedure, without her consent, according to the letter. After the procedure, the medical staff told Alicia only in English, instead of her native Spanish, that she had miscarried.
“For her, that was very traumatic, because she couldn’t understand why she miscarried, what they did to her,” Decker said. National detention standards require ICE to provide language assistance to detainees with limited English proficiency.
Six hours later in the hospital, She was returned to the Basil facility, where officials said Alicia would be deported to her country of origin, which her attorney did not disclose to protect her identity. Although it’s unclear why facility officials made the comments, Alicia interpreted her comments as retaliation for being silenced after her complaints about medical neglect and abuse, her lawyer said.
In fact, she stayed at the facility for two more months. The unbearable symptoms – bleeding, swelling, foul-smelling vaginal discharge and excruciating pain – continued. The pain became so severe that she had difficulty sleeping.
When Decker and his team spoke to Alicia in June, “she could barely communicate with us, because she was in so much pain and she was crying so much,” the lawyer said. Alicia placed several sick call requests with medical staff at the facility, but they went unanswered, according to the letter.
It wasn’t until Alicia was deported in July that she was able to receive antibiotics to treat a vaginal infection that developed from a miscarriage that went untreated while in ICE custody.
Alicia’s story is a painful example of why, according to the 2021 ICE policy, limited exceptions exist for detaining pregnant women — if they are a national security concern, or pose an imminent risk of death, violence, or bodily harm to someone.
But even under those exceptions, the agency is required to monitor detained pregnant women to ensure proper care.
A mother hugs her child at a custody court in New York City. The Trump administration has made it more difficult to track children separated from their parents in ICE custody. (Getty)
And yet, under the second Trump administration, pregnant women are frequently detained. The exact number of pregnant women in immigration detention was not immediately clear, and independent requested that number from ICE.
said DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin independent On November 6, pregnant women accounted for “0.133 percent of all illegal aliens in detention.”
“Pregnant women in detention are also subject to heightened surveillance,” she said. “The ACLU’s letter contains anonymous, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable claims. Pregnant women routinely receive prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support, and accommodations that meet community standards of care.”
Data available from a patchwork of media, lawsuits and congressional reports suggest dozens of pregnant, pregnant and postpartum women have been detained so far this year.
Jain Lakhani, director of immigrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said ICE facilities are a “black box.” independent.
The commission launched its Detention Pregnancy Tracker to build a record of the treatment of pregnant women in ICE custody by piecing together information from lawyers, health care providers, and labor organizers.
From 2019 to 2024, Congress required DHS to provide semiannual reports of pregnant, giving birth or nursing women in ICE custody, including a “detailed justification” for their detention. But Congress did not renew that requirement in 2025.
The exterior of the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basil, Louisiana, where Alicia was given her medical examination. Pregnant women held at the facility have reported having ‘dreams’ about eating meat, with some claiming they went weeks without eating any protein, a lawyer said (AP).
Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray and 28 Senate colleagues wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem in September requesting information on how many pregnant women are being detained.
Noem did not respond to the letter until Nov. 25, a Murray spokeswoman confirmed independent.
The senator said independent That she is fighting for “stronger oversight and humane treatment” of pregnant women in ICE custody.
“The Trump administration’s approach to immigration is brutality for brutality’s sake — they’re perfectly happy to use excessive force against law-breaking and law-abiding immigrants for no reason,” said the Washington Democrat.
Doctors and health agencies recommend certain dietary guidelines during pregnancy, generally advising women to consume at least 300 calories a day. Alicia said the portions were small, even for her alone, and the food was not always edible, according to the civil rights group’s letter.
Some pregnant women reported being fed only small frozen burritos for the day, Lakhani said, while others said their food was greasy or covered in bugs.
Others reported that staples at ICE facilities included less than a handful of beans, half a slice of white bread, a handful of “soggy” green beans, and a “mystery ground beef,” according to Decker. And it’s reportedly not uncommon to go long periods without any meat, especially at the Basile facility.
“We’ve had women dream of us eating meat because they’ve gone weeks without a protein source,” the lawyer said.
The ICE directive requires the agency to ensure that pregnant women detained are “housed in facilities appropriate to their medical and mental health needs” and that their “general health and well-being” are monitored.
However, it seems that the problem of starving pregnant prisoners is more widespread than Basil and Lumkin centers.. At the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, pregnant detainees “were not provided regular access to food, nor were they provided with extra snacks, milk, juice, or any other supplemental nutrition recommended for pregnant individuals,” attorneys said in legal filings regarding the center’s unsanitary, overcrowded conditions.
At the Basile facility, Alicia complained of similarly cold temperatures and unsanitary conditions, Decker said. Federal judges have ordered several ICE facilities to improve conditions after alarming reports.
Other detainees have reported incidents of medical neglect similar to Alicia’s experience. A person housed at the Broadview facility reported seeing an arrested pregnant woman asking ICE officers for medication and being denied, he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem tours ‘Camp 57’, the new ICE facility at Louisiana’s notorious maximum security prison. Judges have ordered ICE facilities across the country to improve their conditions after receiving reports of unsanitary, overcrowded conditions (Getty Images via POOL/AFP)
“She asked the ICE officers for medication that she needed, but they would not provide her with any medication,” he said in the announcement, which is part of the lawsuit surrounding the “crisis situation” at the facility.
Apart from extreme circumstances, family separation is often linked to the detention of pregnant and postnatal women. Lakhani said women who already had children expressed “severe levels of stress and pain around separation”.
In July, ICE issued a new version of its 2022 Directive on the Detention of Parents of Minor Children. The new directive weakened ICE’s obligations, making it more difficult for parents facing deportation to make arrangements for their children.
The 2022 directive says ICE must give parents an opportunity to consult with an attorney to decide next steps for their minor children, such as who will care for them, before removal from the U.S. The 2025 version says ICE must give those opportunities to parents in custody “to the extent practicable.”
Lakhani was particularly concerned about the lack of long-term tracking of children after their parents were affected by ICE in the fallout from mass arrests.
“If you’re arresting a parent, there’s not as much attention to detail to make sure that you know they’re going to be able to have contact with their child, that they’re going to be able to reunite with the child,” Lakhani said.
For Alicia, being separated from her children “caused her extreme psychological distress,” Decker said. “If someone is going through something like that, that alone is enough to cause serious complications in pregnancy.”
To this day, she is estranged from her children.
This article has been updated to quote the correct ICE guidance.
